Local governments that avoid prison-based gerrymandering

Last update: July 20, 2015

“Many counties with large prisons within their borders have rejected the practice of counting inmates as ‘residents’ when they saw how doing so allowed lightly populated towns near prisons to hijack a disproportionate share of political power while diminishing the power of towns that did not have prisons.”

Seven states (Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, Michigan, and New York) encourage or even require local governments to exclude prison populations during redistricting, but local governments in other states have taken initiative to solve the problem on their own. This page lists county or municipal governments that are known to have avoided prison-based gerrymandering when drawing local districts after the 2010 and 2000 Censuses. We’re still working on the list of districts drawn after the 2010 Census. If you know of other places to be added to either list, please contact us.

Note: These listed communities avoid prison-based gerrymandering by various means that all achieve the same result of giving equal representation to residents who live adjacent to and far from the prison. These methods include: ignoring the prison population, cutting a hole in their maps around the prison, overpopulating the district with the prison by the exact amount of the prison population, or splitting the prison population between all districts equally. Not included on this list are the communities like Anamosa, Iowa and Berlin, New Hampshire that abolished their districts as a way to avoid prison-based gerrymandering.

Select counties, cities and towns that avoided prison-based gerrymandering after the 2010 Census